Death's head dh-1

by David Gunn

  “Fuck,” someone says.

  Which is when I realize I’m covered in blood.

  “You okay?”

  It’s Colonel Nuevo.

  “Yes, sir,” I say. “Unfortunately the ferox is dead.”

  “Unfortunately?”

  “It didn’t finish answering my questions.”

  “But you definitely questioned it?”

  I ask his permission to talk in private.

  His guards fall back and so do my four troopers. The fire around the pod is now just ashes, and the moon has shifted across the sky. It makes me realize just how long I’ve been inside.

  “Snakeskull,” I say. “Does that mean anything to you?”

  The colonel begins to shake his head, and then hesitates midshake. “Could be,” he says, but he’s talking to himself. “Braids and snakes. Sounds possible…You ever seen a silverhead?”

  I’m back in the conversation. “No, sir.”

  “Metal braids for hair. Might look like snakes to a ferox.” He hesitates. “We’re talking about something the ferox said, right?”

  “Demanded guarding.”

  “The Enlightened are psychic,” says the colonel. “If you can talk to ferox, maybe they can talk to ferox.”

  The Uplifted number fewer than us, but their technology is good enough to trade with the U/Free, who let us fight each other, probably hoping we’ll destroy each other and solve the problem that way.

  The United Free administer 85 percent of the known galaxy. If you believe their propaganda, the U/Free live in a state of crime-free bliss, spared the trauma of illness and hunger, able to reach their true potential over the span of a dozen lives. As they keep telling us, they’re really disappointed we won’t join them.

  Someday the U/Free will choose between the Enlightened and the Octovians. At the moment they sit it out, proclaiming their sadness at our childish inability to make peace with each other. And in between expressing their sadness, they buy steppewolf furs, wild-side implants, and obscenely sized diamonds from long-dead star systems. Anything exotic, anything natural. Amber, comet ice to mix with cocktails, trinket boxes made from ferox shell.

  I’ve just left a fortune in raw materials behind me.

  “You’re scowling.”

  The colonel is right, I am.

  “Okay,” says Colonel Nuevo. “Snakeheads. What else did you discover?”

  “It escaped from the Enlightened through a tunnel under the city’s defenses. It looked to me like a sewer.”

  The colonel’s staring at me. “You could see into its mind?”

  “I saw its memories.”

  “So,” says Colonel Nuevo. “There’s a sewer.” Even in the half-light of the dying fire I can see the calculation in his eyes. “Tell me,” he says. “Just how good is that little group of yours?”

  CHAPTER 29

  Shil won’t meet my eyes, Franc gives a strained salute and excuses herself, and Haze hands me the SIG diabolo and turns away, before making himself turn back.

  “It woke up.” He sounds upset and scared…and he’s staring everywhere but at the blood splattering my uniform.

  “Woke up?”

  “Yes, sir…So I reset it.”

  “Reset what?”

  “Its scan parameters.”

  “You played with the settings on my gun?”

  My voice is quiet, which scares him even more, and he’s right, because unless he comes up with a really good reason for messing with the SIG, I’m going to hurt him very badly indeed. I’ve seen soldiers get killed for less.

  Taking a deep breath, Haze says, “I just stopped it draining quite so much power. I can restore the earlier settings, if that’s what you want.”

  He’s bought himself a reprieve.

  “Go on.”

  “The combat chip was set to real time plus.”

  “Which means what?”

  Haze thinks I’m testing him. Actually, he might as well be talking another language.

  “Five seconds absolute, fifteen high probable, two minutes high likely, and fifteen high possible; that’s a huge demand for any AI to carry. It looks like you were worried about…”

  Haze hesitates, realizing what he’s just said.

  “Don’t stop now,” I tell him.

  “I mean,” he says, “you obviously expected a high-probability, high-impact event, set the AI accordingly, and then forgot to…”

  Yeah, Haze just dug himself another hole.

  Neen is the only one who remains with me as I strip off my combat armor, stuff handfuls of cold Dylidae lagarto meat into my mouth, and motion him to follow me down to the water’s edge.

  “Keep guard,” I tell him.

  Neen salutes. What’s worse, it looks like he means it.

  The water is colder than earlier, and the mud is sticky beneath my feet; tiny predators nip at my legs and pond weed drags at my ankles like fingers. I’m not superstitious. Well, no more than the next soldier, but this night is leaving a sour taste in my mouth.

  Unless that’s the kyp.

  Idiot, I tell myself. All battles end with this feeling.

  A scar on my knee is aching, as it does when it gets cold. The cut was into bone, a saber slash so powerful it embedded a blade in my leg that had to be wrenched free. Weirdly, the very viciousness of the blow saved my life. While the tribesman was still struggling to retrieve his sword, I put a knife through his heart.

  Karbonne feels a long way from here.

  Adapt or die, adapt and die…the options aren’t great, but one is definitely better than the other. As I climb from the water, the thoughts crowding my head are gone. The ferox is just a beast, its memories of death washed clean. I toss Neen my armor to scrub, struggle into the sodden trousers, and return to our fire. A minute or so later steam is rising off me like a saucepan on the boil.

  “Right,” I say. “Tell me.”

  “What, sir?”

  “Where the others are. What’s troubling them?”

  My sergeant’s face goes blank.

  “Neen. That’s an order. ”

  He looks at me, at the gun I’ve just drawn from its holster, and at the Death’s Head dagger driven into the dirt by my feet.

  “Permission to speak freely, sir?”

  My laugh surprises him. I can’t remember the last time anyone used that phrase and actually meant it. “Speak away.”

  “You tortured a ferox to death, sir. You tortured it so badly you made it talk.”

  “Fuckers can’t talk.”

  “Everyone says this one did.”

  “Everyone?”

  He gestures at the camp around us. It is quiet, at least where we are. All the goodwill gained by sharing the alligator meat is gone in a single rumor.

  “You’re a Death’s Head auxiliary,” I tell him. “You don’t worry what other people think. You worry what I think. Do you understand?”

  He nods.

  “Good,” I say. “Now, the ferox was injured, frozen, and half starving. It was trapped on the wrong planet in someone else’s war.”

  The others are creeping back to listen. I’ll be teaching them to move more quietly.

  “Join us,” I say.

  As Neen’s eyes flick to the darkness, he smiles and I realize he just spotted his sister. She’s skinny as a rat and wears her scowl like a uniform, but I’ll forgive her for now, because she held up well enough when we were hunting the alligator, and besides she looks good naked.

  “The ferox wanted to die,” I tell them. “I offered it death in return for information. The beast was grateful.”

  “Sir,” says Franc, sliding herself between Neen and me. “That’s not what most people are saying.”

  So I explain to her why that’s also good.

  A moon climbs high in the sky and sets a silvery sheen across the marshland around us. The river glistens like a cheap ribbon, and my pond becomes a mirror. Lights can be seen in the distance, the city of Ilseville. We should be fighting. If this were
the legion, we would be fighting. Instead we’re waiting for the peace talks to fail. Apparently the U/Free want to broker a clean surrender of the city.

  We don’t want that. The Enlightened don’t want that. But we’re going through the motions because the United Free demand that we do, their need to interfere being almost as strong as their hunger for news and their obsession with anything exotic. Which, bizarrely enough, apparently includes us.

  In the meantime we’re watching the Uplift city with our hiSats, and they’re watching this camp with their equivalent, and we’re both busy planning our next attacks come tomorrow noon.

  An hour or so after my troop settle, Franc wanders out of the tent she’s sharing with Shil and I hear the noise as she pisses in the darkness. On her way back, she stops and takes a slow look around her, but doesn’t see me where I sit in the shadow of a broken fat-wheel. Neen wakes two hours before dawn and disappears toward the center of camp; when he comes back it’s with an armful of someone else’s wood to feed our fire.

  “Sit,” I tell him.

  He does what he’s told.

  “How old are you?”

  The trooper debates lying. “Eighteen,” he says at last.

  It’s all I can do not to swear. “And the others?”

  “Franc’s twenty-one. I don’t know about Haze.”

  “And Shil?”

  “Twenty-eight,” he says. “You know how it goes. She got drafted because I’m the only boy and we had to provide two soldiers, everyone did.”

  “Describe your training.”

  Neen looks at me, wondering how to answer. “We only got our uniform and rifles the day before yesterday,” he says. “And we didn’t really have training, as such. We’re from the next planet along.”

  “But that’s…” I think it through. I only skimmed my briefing, since most briefings are bollocks; but this system has three planets, and all of them belonged to the enemy until recently.

  “You were Enlightened?”

  “No, sir. Not us. Only important people were that.”

  We leave for the sewer and the city at dawn. Everything we own except our uniforms and weapons is left behind: our tents, food supplies, rucksacks, and fat-wheel combat. We’re going to do this on foot, because we stand a better chance of success that way.

  As we move out, a trooper wishes us luck, and another makes the sign against evil. He bolts when he sees me notice.

  “You enjoy it, don’t you, sir?”

  Shil catches my stare, begins to look away, and then makes herself look back. Maybe she’s seen the way I look at her, or maybe she’s just enough like me to know that rank means nothing.

  It’s what you do with the rank that counts.

  “I’m used to it,” I tell her. “And you’d better get used to it, too.”

  “You know, sir,” she says, “people around here say you’re not human.” Shil raises her chin, and I know she’s wondering if she’s gone too far.

  “Do you think the Enlightened are human?”

  “But that’s the point,” says Shil. “They don’t want to be.”

  “Whereas I was born like this?”

  Shil glances away, and the next few minutes pass in awkward silence. “I’m sorry, sir,” she says finally. “I didn’t mean to speak out of turn.”

  “You didn’t. Believe me; you’d know if you had.”

  The others are listening in, so I address the next comment to all of them. “Within reason, you can say anything. But question or disobey an order and I’ll kill you on the spot.”

  They grin when I grin, but we all know it’s not a joke.

  “What’s within reason?” asks Haze.

  “No blasphemy. No treason. No saying we’re going to lose.”

  “Are we?” Shil asks.

  My smile is sour. “Not if I can help it.”

  Our own tents come to an end shortly after this and we string out in a line, heading for a distant row of trees. I take point and Neen brings up the rear; the rest of them walk fifteen paces apart, trying to tread only in the footsteps of the person in front.

  As we get closer to those trees the ground grows firmer underfoot and our boots stop being sucked by mud. The thorns are stunted, ripe with berries that are probably poisonous. A dragonfly the size of my fist hovers over sullen water; its wings in the early-morning half-light are as iridescent as its body is drab.

  I stop, feeling the others stop behind me.

  The way looks clear. So far I’ve been relying on flickers of memory taken from the ferox, but it was in pain and sometimes close to unconscious…Tracks are what I really need.

  My troop wait.

  A cold wind from behind us carries the faintest traces of our distant fires. We’re out of sight of our own camp. What I need to know is whether anyone is watching us from up ahead. My kyp is useless; it hasn’t been able to pick up anything in days. And I’m not certain it could recognize the Enlightened anyway.

  Communicated, freely tied, willingly of one accord. A dozen different phrases pretend to tell the UnEnlightened what it’s like to make the change. I suspect few of them come close to the reality.

  A quick flick of my hand and the others begin to move forward. Roots catch at our boots and low loops of thorn act like trip wires, but we keep moving until the trees thin and we hit a plowed field. It’s the first such field any of us have seen since landing. Huge footprints lead toward the gate where I stand. A twist of fur is caught in the hinge, and dry blood on wood indicates where the ferox halted to gather breath.

  I’ve got what I need.

  We find bodies an hour later. A woman missing half her skull, and a man ripped from abdomen to shoulder, despite his body armor. Both have fired their weapons from the smell of the barrels.

  Behind me I hear Franc and Haze vomit.

  Another three corpses wait for us half an hour after that. One is clean-killed, head twisted so far his vertebrae have simply shattered. The others are messy, but still cleaner than the first two.

  “Strip the bodies,” I order.

  Haze shakes his head, and then staggers back, clutching his jaw. It’s not hard as punches go, but I’ve still not forgiven him for messing with my gun, even if he did make it better.

  “Want to join them?” I ask, nodding at the bodies.

  The others go very still.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Haze says.

  He gets to strip the three bodies on his own, as punishment. The boy’s overweight and clumsy and it takes him twice as long as it should, but he manages it eventually.

  Two women, one man…all very dead.

  Shil, Haze, and Franc swap uniforms. Although I allow them to scrub clean their new outfits first. The ditch they use is muddy, and I’m not sure that washing the uniforms makes that much difference, but it seems to matter.

  About ten minutes after this we reach the sewer.

  It sounds simple. First two bodies, then three bodies, a change of clothing for the junior troopers, and a quick march to the entrance of a tunnel. But my ankles are rubbed raw by my boots, and if I feel like that, then God knows how the others must feel. We’ve just marched for two hours across marshland and mud, enough to exhaust even hardened troopers.

  I’ve ordered them to swap weapons, too. So now they’re armed with pulse rifles belonging to the enemy. It’s Shil who asks me why. After she makes absolutely sure I understand she’s after information only, and she’s in no way questioning my judgment. Her voice as she explains this is just deadpan enough to avoid outright insolence.

  We stop. I stare at her. “You tell me,” I say.

  Shil chews her lip, the first sign of weakness she’s displayed since we hunted alligator together, and she stops the moment she realizes I’ve noticed. Neen and the others are watching us.

  “If you get captured,” Shil says finally. “We simply say we’re Ilsevillect militia and you captured us. And we’re really glad to be rescued.”

  “And…?”

  “If neces
sary, we can pretend that we captured Neen and you.”

  “Well done.”

  Shil’s brother looks so shocked it makes me want to laugh. So I sit everyone down in the entrance to the tunnel and tell them what’s going to happen, why it’s going to happen, and exactly what I expect of them.

  I don’t bother explaining what’s going to happen if they fuck up. They’re not stupid; they can work that out for themselves.

  In the center of Ilseville is a Trade Hall. Old and decrepit, it’s impressive on first viewing but poorly defended with too many ways in. These are the colonel’s words to me and he’d better be telling the truth. Inside the hall is an Uplifted; our job is to capture it.

  “You mean an Enlightened,” says Haze without thinking. He’s backing away from me before I’ve even turned to face him.

  “No,” I say. “I mean Uplifted.”

  “It’ll be guarded,” says Neen.

  “Well guarded,” Shil adds.

  And I realize something: These people know about this. “You’ve seen an Uplifted?”

  Everyone glances at everyone else. If it wasn’t so funny, I’d be angry.

  “Haze has,” says Franc. “Once, in passing.”

  The way she says this sounds like she’s giving Haze his story, a story to which she’s expecting him to keep, and from the way the boy’s refusing to meet my eyes, whatever the real story is…It’s way more complex than Franc’s simple outline makes it sound.

  “Haze,” I say, “this Uplifted you saw once, describe it…”

  He hesitates, but only because he’s struggling for the right words. “It’s like a machine,” he says finally. “Pyramid-shaped and full of lights, almost pretty. But very dangerous.”

  That’s it, the sum total of his description.

  It doesn’t matter how much I demand clarification, all my anger does is lock the truth tight in his throat. We go into the darkness in silence and no one looks in my direction for a very long time.

  CHAPTER 30

  Like the guts of an ice worm,” I say when we’re twenty minutes into the tunnel. Some round-mawed machine has bored its way through compacted mud, shitting concrete onto the walls as it goes, only the concrete is crumbling, and fractures reveal dark earth beyond.